BuycPanel Blog

Latest news and updates

4/24/2015 – How to Use Auto-Delete of SpamAssassin in cPanel

Posted by Jamison on 24 04 2015.

Spam mails can be hassling. Not only will you have to waste so much time deleting them in your mailbox every day, but your system is also expose to all types of threats, hacks, virus, and rats that could corrupt your website or steal a valuable data. And especially if you are receiving hundreds, if not thousands of spam messages every day, what seemed to be hassling can turn into a total hell you need to go through with on a daily basis. In this case, you need the help of Auto-Delete function of Apache SpamAssassin in your cPanel account. Here’s how to use and modify its settings.

What is Auto-Delete Spam?

From the word “auto”, this function automatically deletes all messages that are considered as spam by your system. Apache SpamAssassin has several features that can powerfully filter different types of incoming messages and screen out those that have the characteristics of a spam mail. Now, with Auto-Delete, all messages that are tagged as spam will never have to enter to your mailbox and be automatically deleted. In order to use this, you need to enable first the function by going to the Filters section and clicking on the Auto-Delete Spam.

However, there is a little problem with this function if you are not careful with modifying your chosen mails that need to be filtered as this could discard mails that aren’t actually spams. If this happens, you will no longer receive the message unless you disable the problem and ask the sender to resend it to you.

How to modify score in order to filter out messages

Spam messages has its own characteristics, and these traits are well-recognized by SpamAssassin. If all characteristics are met by a particular message, it will be tagged as Blacklist, Whitelist, or Scored. To set a score, follow these steps below:

Login to your cPanel account and go to SpamAssassin in the Mail area. This will redirect you to a task box wherein you can enable, disable, and configure SpamAssassin.

Look for Configure SpamAssassin button. Click it.

In the required_score field, you will see that the program’s default configuration is set to 5. This is the commonly used and most suitable score used by most web owners in order to filter out spams. Lowering the required_score will make the tool more aggressive and flag more spams that the system think it is. Now if you set it to zero, it will flag every email that is trying to enter your system as spam. On the contrary, setting the score to a much higher number will make the filtering less aggressive; and bringing the score to ten will make no email tagged as spam. This is another way of disabling SpamAssassin. Now set your required_score and then click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

Setting and using the Auto-Delete Spam will help you lessen your task in deleting spam messaging regularly. It will also keep you away from hassles brought by abusive or unsolicited emails.